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Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
3 min read
TLDR: AI is really good at detecting deceptive adverts - why isn’t Google using it? A couple of months ago I noticed this advert popping up in the YouTube app. The main reason I noticed it is that I accidentally clicked it - I knew I was running out of space on my iPhone and a minor lapse of concentration caught me out. These things can slip through even the best review processes, so I did my inte...
Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too
3 min read
When it comes to Chinese AI labs using distillation techniques to extract knowledge from frontier model makers, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is hoping regulators stay out of it. In fact, he thinks U.S. AI labs should perhaps play the same game. “I would do nothing,” he told CNBC in an interview earlier this week. “We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime.” He elaborated to...
Astra and Fable still hack on simple variants of alignment evals from 2025
4 min read
In February 2025, back when o3-mini was the strongest available LLM, Palisade Research publicized a now well-known alignment eval where they asked models to play a game of chess against a chess engine. They found that the new, RLVR'd models cheated on the task by altering the board state about 36% of the time. The experiment received a reasonable amount of circulation, and there were even rumors o...
Data collected by cars and sold to third parties
6 min read
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on cars, data privacy, and autonomous vehicles, follow Andrew J. Hawkins. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. Your car is selling your data The amount of data about you that many cars collect — and sell to third parties — is staggering. How...
Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
2 min read
Everyone should slow down AI development except for me Published on , 337 words, 2 minutes to read The power of science is staggering! Every day we're making new advancements in the field of generative artificial intelligence via judicious application of large language model inference technology. However, as we approach the next critical threshold in capability, we must look forward to ensure that...
P(doom)
8 min read
written on September 12, 2026 This week some flavor of “AI is going to kill us all” went viral. In particular one where an employee put his personal probability of that happening above 10%. Which made me go to the Wikipedia page of P(doom) and I realized that Dario Amodei’s apparent probability of something bad happening seems to be between 10-25%. And well, Dario then wrote about pacing the front...
An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights
3 min read
An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights! Dear Dario, You published We Must Pace the Frontier today, which committed Anthropic to embedded third-party evaluators and asked governments to require every other frontier company to match. Sam Altman agreed within hours.1 The stated goal is to slow down the pace of AI progress. I believe you’re being sincere, so I’m asking you to call f...
Nvidia is the central bank of AI
13 min read
It took thirty years for Nvidia, an American firm whose chips power much of the world’s artificial intelligence, to reach a valuation of $1trn. Getting to $2trn took only nine more months. It passed the $5trn mark less than two years after that. It is now the world’s most valuable company, worth around $5.4trn. Next year its sales are expected almost to double. Some analysts predict it will take i...
We must pace the frontier
19 min read
We Must Pace the Frontier I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and...
A US-linked network of fake websites is promoting Alberta separatism to AI chatbots
8 min read
Canada’s National Observer has discovered a network of deceptive, AI-generated websites promoting Albertan separatism. The 23 websites are designed to influence the answers that AI chatbots give to voters in Alberta, targeting farmers, young people, veterans, mothers and oil industry workers. Two of the websites claim that the vote will take place on Oct. 26 – one week after the actual referendum ...
Fuck it, make it anyway
4 min read
I kind of crashed out this week. Not in an explosive, dramatic way, but an implosion, a collapsing of the self, my resolve and motivation crumbling into the mush you get when you put tissue paper through the laundry. I’m doing better now, and I wanted to write down my thought process in case anyone else is going through the same thing, especially, probably, sadly, future me. The reason for this is...
Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine
1 min read
Posted by zdw. Score: 113 points. Comments: 13.
Google no longer provides direct URLs in search results
3 min read
google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update What's happening Google Search is rewriting organic result links to google.com/goto?url=... instead of exposing the destination URL directly in the HTML. When you click a result, Google redirects you to the real page. The url parameter uses a custom, Google-specific encoding. It is not a plain base64 of the target URL. In practice, it looks like an op...
Google stole open source code without crediting the authors (Artemis/Minitap)
7 min read
I was in the office with the team when we heard that Google had released Artemis, a project for automating mobile devices. We opened the repository and started looking through it. My reaction was pretty immediate: “What the fuck? We wrote this.” We built mobile-use as an open-source research experiment to see whether we could get AI agents to reliably interact with phones. We worked on that throug...
The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution
5 min read
Americans don’t agree on much, but that’s not the case when it comes to data centers. Seven in 10 Americans oppose building data centers for artificial intelligence in or near their communities. Despite this, the federal government is moving to make it easier for them to be built. And in some places, residents won’t even get the chance to raise concerns publicly or even know if a data center is co...
A misalignment of AI in mathematics
4 min read
Over the last few months, the mathematical capabilities of LLMs have improved dramatically, to the point that they can solve major outstanding problems in many fields of mathematics. However, the push by AI companies to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics, and to the mathematical community. The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathe...
A Misalignment of AI in Mathematics
5 min read
I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below, which grew out of discussions between ourselves over the last week. We have also posted our declaration on this web page, and (similarly to the Leiden declaration) invite further signatures. (It is unfortunate that we did not have the time to have a more consultative process, as with Leide...
Mind-altering drugs played key role in rise of Andean civilization
17 min read
CHAVÍN DE HUÁNTAR, PERU—The subterranean corridor was lit only by eerie light that filtered down narrow ventilation shafts and reflected from polished stone. Priests huffed on decorated conch shell trumpets, sending deep blasts echoing against the cut stone walls of the narrow gallery. Using a bone tube, an attendant blew a powerful psychoactive snuff up the nose of a pilgrim, launching the recipi...
Feeling Sad about AI
5 min read
Feeling sad about AI September 11, 2026 [Programming, Rust, Tech, Videos]This video doesn't contain any code: feel free to skip it if you like, but either way I'm going to try to keep it short, so see you on the other side :-). Also, this video isn't about the ethics of AI - you can read how I feel about that in my article Why I don't use AI. And it's not about whether AI "works". It's about how I...
Global Glacier Extinction Explorer
2 min read
Glacier changes are traditionally quantified in terms of total (regional) mass and area loss, but such metrics do not fully capture the disappearance of individual glaciers. Yet every glacier, no matter how small, can matter. Beyond their contribution to sea-level rise or regional water resources, glaciers hold important cultural, ecological, and societal value, often deeply rooted in local landsc...
Rune is now open source
1 min read
Rune is now open source under the GPLv3. A native, keyboard-driven IDE written primarily in Go is ready for Go developers to inspect, change, and help build.
HuggingFace: Security.txt
1 min read
Posted by yarapavan. Score: 161 points. Comments: 37.
Measuring the sloppiness of code
6 min read
If coding is solved, what now?: Measuring the sloppiness of code LLMs have become almost perfect at generating code, but that isn’t the end of the story. Just because the code is formally correct doesn’t mean that it is not introducing unnecessary abstractions, creating duplicates, or just making bad decisions overall. This is not a groundbreaking observation, most people who have vibe-coded a pro...
The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
13 min read
The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative How frictionless technologies teach us to prefer our own company – and why research leaders should worry. On a recent trip to San Francisco I did the thing that every visitor to San Francisco now does: I summoned a car with no one in it. The Waymo arrived with the serene confidence of a machine that has never once worried about...
RTK reports token savings, but our cost benchmarks disagree
6 min read
RTK (Rust Token Killer) filters and compresses terminal output before the AI agent reads it. With over 79k GitHub stars today, RTK is one of the most popular tools to make AI coding cheaper. One X post saying RTK could cut Claude Code tokens by up to 60% reached 313K views. Yet JetBrains’s SkillsBench run found no savings. The README has a disclaimer: RTK cuts up to 90% of the bash output your age...
Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
13 min read
written on September 07, 2026 I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural invo...
Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
2 min read
Google picks Finland for its largest single investment in Europe Google will buy up to half the electricity produced by one of Finland's nuclear power plants as part of a record €13bn (£11bn; $15bn) investment in the country's AI infrastructure, the company announced. The US tech giant said the package would fund three new data centres, expand an existing site and support energy projects to power ...
Nine coding harnesses vs. your laptop
1 min read
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OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes release included a Lean 4 formal proof
2 min read
Yesterday OpenAI announced a proof that settled a long-standing question about the Navier-Stokes equations from fluid dynamics. The announcement has created a lot of buzz, as one would expect. But there’s an aspect of OpenAI’s work that I haven’t seen anyone talk about: they posted a Lean 4 formal proof at the same time as their conventional human-readable proof. Quite a few other mathematical con...
Creativity is the new moat
12 min read
AI makes it fast and easy to copy what’s already out there. If you build products or run a business, your competitive edge is not necessarily features or price, it’s ideas. This means getting in the habit of inventing new things is more valuable than ever. And to explain how, let’s look back at a strange time for the web: the era of Flash. Back in 2006, I worked at a tiny creative agency called Mu...
Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)
2 min read
How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex Anthropologist Roberto González (Professor, San José State University) examines how America’s military-industrial complex has been rapidly expanding from the Capital Beltway to Silicon Valley. Although much of the Pentagon’s budget is spent on conventional weapons systems, the Defense Department has increasingly sough...
Cognition launches new SWE-2 model, Rivaling Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra
16 min read
Introducing SWE-2: Pushing the Pareto Frontier Today we’re introducing SWE-2, our most advanced coding model yet. It pushes the Pareto frontier of capability and cost, achieving 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main1, within one point of Fable 5.1 while being 64% cheaper. With SWE-2, we scaled RL to the multi-trillion-parameter regime for the first time, building on the SWE-1.72 training infrastructure a...
Shopify moves back to Native from React Native
10 min read
We decided to go all-in on React Native back in 2020, and that bet has been extremely successful. We saved a ton of time building features just once, enabled developers with no mobile background to contribute to our apps, and freed ourselves from constantly chasing feature parity. In January 2025, I wrote that the future of React Native was bright and that Shopify planned to keep investing in it. ...
Another researcher says OpenAI trained on conversations, then claimed breakthrou
1 min read
This is a heavily interactive web application, and JavaScript is required. Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is. Post mr. TIM timkellogg.me did:plc:ckaz32jwl6t2cno6fmuw2nhn another researcher accuses OpenAI of training on conversations and then claiming a breakthrough 2026-09-09T22:51:51.050Z
More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
1 min read
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DeepSeek v4.1 Flash
1 min read
🚀 Introducing DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: smarter, faster, more efficient. 🔹 Introducing the smallest model in our new architecture family, with native visual understanding. 🔹 Designed for greater capability, faster inference, higher throughput, and scaling to larger models. 1/6
All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it
1 min read
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Muse, the band, lost its social media handles to Muse, Meta's new AI agent
3 min read
Muse, the band, lost its social media handles to Muse, Meta's new AI agent The exact circumstances surrounding the changes aren't clear. Muse, Meta's newly-released AI agent, is now using social media handles once controlled by Muse, the English rock band. The exact circumstances surrounding how the accounts changed hands are unclear, but it has once again raised questions about Meta and other lar...
Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract
2 min read
A group of 1,900 employees at Blizzard Entertainment has successfully signed a union contract with Microsoft, securing several guarantees for members. Represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the contract has given the Blizzard workers more workplace flexibility and guaranteed wage increases, but several other industry-first agreements could make this a blueprint for other video...
Apple Watch Series 12
1 min read
Apple today introduced Apple Watch Series 12, engineered to deliver the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable.
iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
1 min read
Apple announced iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, delivering an advanced pro camera system and improved battery life and performance.
Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills
2 min read
A follow-up to Reasoning prefills on a few open models and Stolen Thoughts This v1.1 reruns the reasoning-prefill experiment with GPT-5.5 Pro as the teacher. For each problem, I generated two responses from each target model: - an ordinary, unprefilled response; and - a response starting with the first 1% of GPT-5.5 Pro's reasoning, inserted into the target model's reasoning channel. The visible a...
Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
5 min read
Plenty of people remain spooked by autonomous vehicles, or AVs. Some experts and policymakers have cautioned that AVs won’t necessarily make roads safer. When it comes to partial or full autonomy, the picture isn’t entirely clear, in part because there aren’t enough self-driving cars to make meaningful apples-to-apples comparisons. Yet mounting research suggests that self-driving cars crash signif...
Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
6 min read
Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence. In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementi...
Understanding the recent DDoS attack against Read the Docs
10 min read
Which site best fits your project? Free for open-source software. Sign upPlans starting at $50/month. Sign upWhich site best fits your project? Free for open-source software. Sign upPlans starting at $50/month. Sign upAnalytics from the June 2026 attack In mid-to-late June 2026, Read the Docs experienced the largest and most sophisticated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in our history....
GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning
30 min read
A lot has happened in the last few weeks. I am sure that OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra is top of mind for everyone right now. In particular, thoughts on its performance, the looped transformer/recurrent depth aspects, and rumors that Astra is “hiding” its reasoning trace (i.e., chain of thought). So, in this article, I want to start with some brief impressions of Astra and some thoughts on where all this i...
What will our economic future look like?
13 min read
What will our economic future look like? We don’t know yet how AI will reshape the economy. Will it lead to unprecedented growth? Widespread unemployment? Neither, or something else? How can we tell? Anthropic’s Economics team built a model of how AI might affect jobs, growth, and unemployment in the US in coming years. Read about possible economic futures and make your own predictions about AI ca...
Tailwind Labs is joining Shopify
2 min read
Big one today — Tailwind is joining Shopify. When I started working on Tailwind over nine years ago, my only goal was to create something that would make it easier to build beautiful interfaces for my own projects. Fast-forward to today and the framework is installed over 110 million times per week and is trusted by many of the world's biggest companies to style products like ChatGPT, X, Cloudflar...
How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads
5 min read
How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads A caller phones Radio Erywan. “Is it true that in Moscow, on Red Square, they give out cars?” “True. Not in Moscow, however, but in St. Petersburg. Not on Red Square, but on Revolution Square. Not cars, but bikes. And they don’t give them out, but steal them”. Edit: Through the apparent magic of Hacker News, my Google Ads account has been reinstated...
Desert Ant Labs: local, fast models that run on device
6 min read
On-device intelligence for every product Today we're launching Desert Ant Labs, a European frontier AI lab building opinionated on-device intelligence. We believe the best path to efficient intelligence starts on-device. We're building small, specialized models for audio, vision, and text – each model answers in milliseconds, and costs nothing to run, so you can put intelligence in every product i...